7GUIs: A GUI Programming Benchmark

There are countless GUI toolkits in different languages and with diverse approaches to GUI development. Yet, diligent comparisons between them are rare. Whereas in a traditional benchmark competing implementations are compared in terms of their resource consumption, here implementations are compared in terms of their notation. To that end, 7GUIs defines seven tasks that represent typical challenges in GUI programming. In addition, 7GUIs provides a recommended set of evaluation dimensions.

One might wonder why such a project is useful. First, GUI programming is in fact not an easy task. 7GUIs may help in identifying and propagating better approaches to GUI programming, ultimately pushing programming forward. Second, alternative approaches to GUI programming and programming in general gained in popularity. Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of these alternatives versus the traditional OOP & MVC GUI development approach is interesting. Finally, there was no widely used set of tasks which represent typical GUI programming challenges when 7GUIs was conceived (2014).